The Entertainer has been revamped for a fiftieth anniversary production which is both timely and out-of-date. Osborne's play is set in 1956 ('our finest shower', as his anti-hero calls it), when British Imperial might was dealt a death blow by the Suez crisis. An exhausted Britain confronts its own collapse, asserting its military might in a misguided attempt at clinging on to past glories. Real commercial motives are hidden by sabre rattling and proclaiming high-minded ideals which no one believes in - Britannia is embodied on stage by a naked woman running to fat, with breasts like 'fried eggs' and a stuffed bulldog.
      She is the backdrop in the vaudeville act by the seedy Entertainer, Archie Rice (Robert Lindsay), whose family share their home with Irish, Poles and a black ballet dancer. The whole lot - both immigrants and the government - want 'locking up', says the grandfather Billy Rice (John Normington), who epitomises the sour patriotism of three generations of Rices.
      The play's starting point is the unannounced arrival of Billy's granddaughter. Jean, the daughter of Archie's first wife (who left him after catching him in flagrante with his now-wife Phoebe), has just come back from the demo in Trafalgar Square campaigning against Anthony Eden's government. Mick, her half-brother, is fighting in Suez, and it is in him, for the moment, that all the positive Imperial ambitions of Britain can still live on. Alcoholism is already the response to imminent collapse, and even Jean, who has escaped the Rice clan through education, can down gin with the best of them. One of the play's themes is drinking and the resulting feeling-inflation. No one knows what or how to feel. The grandfather remains a cut above the other characters because he won't touch gin until a toast is forced upon him - and then it's downhill all the way.
      Bill is capable like his son, Archie, of fantastic, confessional crudity when talking to his granddaughter Jean ('you don't look a the mantlepiece when you're stoking the fire'). Yet John Normington creates an incredibly sympathetic patriarch. His obvious dignity, the fuss with which he puts away his best patent leather shoes in a cardboard box after promenading on the seafront, is touching. Bill was once a successful music hall act but has watched the music hall deteriorate. He finds the modern world a disaster. The death of the variety show mirrors the collapse of British Imperial might. His old world charm (and sexism) gave variety its dignity and its contrast between crudity and tragi-comedy. His moving recollection of the greats of his day when he steps forward under the proscenium arch and sings their praises underlines that Archie has never made it and lacks the dignity to make his performance special.
      Robert Lindsay still must feel the ghost of Larry Olivier in his portrayal of Archie. For my taste, he couldn't quite energize Archie with enough evil malice to carry off his moribund stage antics. It's important Archie dies on stage every night, 'I'm dead behind these eyes.' He's used up all his feelings in performance and has none left to spare on his family but he must convey some of the crackling energy of expectation and desire which drives every performance.
      The Entertainer elicits a strange audience response. We are embarrassed by Archie's routines and cajoled into laughter, not by his jokes but by his comments about our lack of response to his deliberately awful gags. He tells us the building is old, it cannot withstand our gales of laughter. Lucky we don't laugh. At least he's 'having a go' but I found myself wishing he wouldn't. At the play's centre is a frightening portrayal of a reciprocal deadness between an awful comic and an equally jaded audience who are as dead as each other. Like a Beckett character, Archie only exists in performance. Enacting one of his hackneyed routines about sexiness with hand firmly in trousers he can turn memories of love into smut. Wife Phoebe sings 'The boy I love is up in the gallery' which he changes into 'The boy I love is up in the lavatory.' Images of meat abound. Whether it be how, in poverty, he bought bacon slices to keep him going, or descriptions of him slicing meat off himself each night for the hungry audience intimate the real cost of performance.
      The play seemed overlong. Like a bad performance or an afternoon in the company of belligerent drunks, always geeing each other up for another joke, we are left demoralized. The legacy of colonialism is like an open sore without any remedy. We can only worry the sore and attack ourselves. Hence the all too familiar portrayal of a family turned in on itself, drinking more, unsure of what their values mean. When Archie's son is returned home dead, a military hero, the family confronts its own hollowness: how much exactly does a pint of draft cider cost? Archie and Bill can't quite remember and continue their ongoing diversionary dance. 
Daniel Jeffreys